So, a puzzled Keir Dullea, surrounded by antique-style furniture, turns around and sees himself as an old man. What film are we watching?

Award yourself 10 points if you answered “2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY”, and eleventy million points if you added “or DESADE.” Since DESADE is a film about a man trapped in an infinite time loop, the sense of deja vu Dullea must have experienced from his work as astronaut Dave Bowman may have helped him get into character.

Donatien Alphonse, Marquis de Sade, embodied by Dullea, is on his death bed, adrift in visions from his past life (it doesn’t so much flash before his eyes as trundle) in this late work from blacklistee and ZULU helmer Cy Endfield, produced by AIP. One wonders what must have gone wrong with Endfield’s career to bring him to this point — and thence to the horrors of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER? After 1965’s SANDS OF THE KALAHARI, he didn’t work for four years, and when he did…

…he got a project already rejected by Roger Corman. Corman told his bosses at AIP that this movie wouldn’t work, since the censors would let them show what they needed to show in order to make a respectable life of Sade. He also voiced concerns with their choice of replacement — there was some doubt that Endfield would be able to bring himself to include the exploitation elements the film needed in the marketplace. The whole thing was a balancing act between the censors and the box office. Endfield faithfully promised to shoot a spicy yarn, but seemingly chickened out when it came to the crunch, so Corman was roped in to shoot some extra skin.

How we laughed. Pouring hot wax on prostitutes — I guess you had to be there.

You can pretty much identify the Corman interpolations: he shoots the orgies in slow motion through a thick red filter, just like Hazel Court’s satanic rite in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. It pretty well robs the scenes of erotic potential, since we lose the flesh tones, and gain only the opportunity to observe jiggling cellulite at 100 fps. Also, everybody’s laughing in Dullea’s orgies. The relationship between sex and humour is a complex one, but generally speaking, if you’re throwing an orgy (does one throw orgies? Or organize them, like posses?) and the “guests” or “participants” or “fuckers” or whatever you call them, are in a constant state of hysteria, is anything going to get done? Is anyone going to get done?

Leaving aside the sex, we have the story, at least in theory. It’s a kind of biography-by-hallucination, comparable to Raoul Ruiz’s more recent KLIMT, only written by Richard Matheson. I admire Matheson’s work, and his contribution to cinema is as fine as his contribution to genre fiction, but I have to admit his bad-guy dialogue is inclined to the fruity. He really needs Vincent Price to get away with some of these lines. A few years later, acting in a TV version of Huxley’s Brave New World, Dullea would display the camp chops necessary to pull off a Vincent, but here he lacks full confidence in his flounce and pout, so it’s left to older hams to relish the rich flow of Matheson’s verbiage.

Lilli Palmer is in fine fettle as Sade’s mother-in-law (and WHAT a mother-in-law!), and John Huston has disruptive fun with the part of Sade’s wicked uncle, the Abbé. He even plays his first scene with some kind of stage Oirish accent, just because he’s John Huston and nobody can stop him. He also gets the most disturbing scene, the primal scene, if you will, where Sade as a boy spies on his uncle molesting a maid, and then gets caught and punished. The future arch-pervert’s young mind forms a lasting association between sex, cruelty and voyeurism. It’s all very dollar-book Freud, but it’s passable as motivation, and the sequence is genuinely distressing. I’m not sure you could even film it nowadays.

Eyes Wide Crossed.

Complicating the psychodrama is his love for his sister-in-law. He’s forced to wed plain-jane Anna Massey (in the middle film of her sadeian trilogy, sandwiched between PEEPING TOM and FRENZY) despite being hopelessly in love with glamourpuss Senta Berger. This embitters him and sets him on his path of sexual turpitude, if turpitude is the word for it.

Senta’s little helper.

Matheson may have a simplistic but clear angle on Sade’s psychosexual upset, but he’s forced to short-change us on Sade the philosopher. The do-what-thou-wilt catechisms we associate with Sade’s books are here either ignored, in order to present us with Sade the lovelorn drip, or they’re given to the Abbé, the real villain of the piece. This rather falsifies the story, and is the aspect of the film the Divine Marquis would no doubt have despised the most. In fact, Sade’s writing barely gets a look in.

“Ooh, I could crush a grape…”

Paul Schrader observed, when he was making Mishima, that the only way to film a writer’s life was by dramatizing his stories. With a composer, you play the music; with a painter, you show the work; but a novelist is unique since you have to actually adapt their art into a whole new medium just to give some (unavoidably falsified) idea of what they do. I’d be interested in a radical solution to this problem that involved lengthy recitations, but I can’t think of one of hand. All I can think of is films that dramatize the work (MISHIMA, DREAMCHILD, GOTHIC) or films that don’t, and fail (IRIS). And oh yes, a third category, which DESADE falls into —

— along with Cronenberg’s NAKED LUNCH — the films which create a phantasmagoria, the life of the artist merged with their work, or filtered through their style. That’s what Matheson has tried to write, but he’s unable to get to grips with Sade’s pornographic side, and unwilling to get to grips with his world-view (which is arguably even more unpleasant). But at least it gives him an unusual style and structure. Increasingly the film plays like the last act of Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL, with reality and fantasy cascading together in an avalanche of dream.

How do you solve a problem like the Marquis? I confess I haven’t seen MARQUIS, in which the naughty nobleman’s life is enacted by puppets designed by renaissance man Roland Topor, with the Marquis’s most satisfying relationship being with his talking penis, but that sounds like the most realistic version conceivable. Nor have I seen Peter Brook’s film of his stage success, THE MARAT/SADE. I have scant regard for Brook as a filmmaker, but that might be at least a bit interesting. Saw the play once. It was a bit interesting. Philip Kaufman’s QUILLS falls flat because again, it’s reluctant to admit how nasty Sade’s fantasies were: when it tries to do so, the film’s rather jovial tone disintegrates, which would be fine if it were an intentional effect, but it doesn’t seem to be. Pasolini’s SALO is still the most unadulterated, apocalyptic version of Sade put on screen, and that was promptly banned in nearly every country on Earth. I believe it was legal to screen it on the Moon, but the film came out three years after the last manned flight there. I’m not sure astronaut Eugene A. Cernan has seen the film to this day.

Their royal lownesses, the King and Queen of Lilliput.

Returning to the Endfield: he directs it with some pictorial flair (although my MGM DVD seems to cut things off at the top), aided by decorous locations, but there’s sometimes a lack of good sense in his shooting: after showing the newly married Dullea and Massey advancing between two lines of people, he cuts to a reverse angle, seemingly a POV, but shot from knee-height as if the protagonists had been abruptly munchkinated. He’s also inclined to masturbate the zoom lens a bit.

Somehow, the film is still a decent watch, maybe because it has enough bad taste to compensate for its lack of bad taste. It’s not offensive as porn or very upsetting as drama (apart from that one scene), but it’s decorated with enough lapses of common sense to make it amusing. The opening credits, in which Sade is envisioned as a ball-playing winged fish, are ludicrously abstract, and the music by the wonderfully-named Billy Strange chooses to equate decadence with modernity, so that the faux-18th century chamber music segues into bongo jazz or wah-wah guitar whenever anything juicy threatens to happen. Like most bad decisions in films scoring, this approach has a perfectly sound reason behind it: it’s just that it doesn’t work. I expect Michael Mann to try something similar any day now.

Here’s some more sado-erotic action with Lilli Palmer, thirty years earlier in Carol Reed’s pre-make of SHOWGIRLS, enticingly entitled A GIRL MUST LIVE. Lilli’s Scottish opponent is the great Renee Houston.

Yes! This week we watch all the Terence Fisher Hammer Productions about Baron Frankenstein and his varied creations.

This means omitting EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, which isn’t a Fisher and doesn’t fit the continuity of the other films (indeed, it seems to go all-out to destroy all coherence) and HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN which stars Ralph Bates instead of Cushing and likewise isn’t a Fisher.

Most of the Fishers are written by Jimmy Sangster, Hammer’s prime creator of thick-eared dialogue and inventive plotting, a very important figure in the development of the Hammer style. While the cast may have despaired of Sangster’s speeches (Christopher Lee grumbled about having no lines and Cushing told him to be grateful), he was instrumental in stripping away the niceties of Universal’s gothic tales, substituting brutality, villainy and nihilism.

Of course, part of the Hammer approach is catchpenny hucksterism, beginning with the title of this one — there’s no curse mentioned in the movie. (Similarly, the later VIKING QUEEN has no Vikings, but a line of dialogue has been helpfully added to appease pedantic Scots like me: “She is our Viking Queen!”) Hammer obviously wanted a title distinctly different from Universal’s, because they were nervous of lawsuits. I don’t see any evidence that Sangster ever read Mary Shelley’s original novel (try it, it’s perfectly readable and entertaining), but he probably glanced at it, borrowing the notion of referring to Lee’s mangled creation as “the creature” rather than “the monster”, which again was useful in differentiating the new film from its predecessor.

Despite the fear of being seen as an unlicensed remake, Sangster cooked up a few references to the first two James Whale movies — at one point, a small boy and a blind man are introduced. The boy immediately heads to the shore of a lake, where he sits and picks something off the ground, immediately recalling Boris Karloff’s encounter with the flower-picking little girl. Meanwhile, the blind man, a direct swipe from BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, meets and is immediately attacked by the creature. Hammer films are setting out their store: there is to be no pathos and no sentimentality here, just nasty surprises all the way.

The other classic horror film that seems to inform this movie is Murnau’s NOSFERATU, both in the cut of Lee’s coat, and in his pose when spying on Hazel Court through a skylight. Images like this show Fisher’s flair for this kind of storytelling. Robbed of the dreamlike somnambulism of Murnau, CURSE picks up the pace and delivers muscular thrills and punchy delivery. Fisher is helped enormously in this by his cast.

First, Cushing. Influenced by his admiration for Laurence Olivier, Cushing delivers an energetic and highly physical performance, throwing himself into the action sequences with abandon (see how he mimes getting a stitch in his side after running upstairs to fight the monster— sorry, “creature”). Baron Frankenstein may be a man of science, but he’s also a MAN. Sangster has also added an illicit affair with the French maid, so that from the very first film, Cushing’s Baron is morally tainted by more than his zeal for medicine. MOST of his crimes are motivated by a desire to achieve greatness in science, but he’s also perfectly capable of beastly behaviour for purely selfish ends.

Cushing is so perfect for this film, and this genre, and somebody was smart enough to realise it. He goes with the generally vigorous style of the movie (vigorous in a slightly stiff way, like Lee’s energetic yet ungainly creature) but adds cultivation and a believable intelligence. He’s also adroit at getting away with Sangster’s more boggling lines of dialogue, such as “We hold in the palms of our hands such secrets that have never been dreamed of.” And when handed a nice gag, like “Let him rest in peace — while he can,” he underplays magnificently.

Playing the juvenile version of Cushing is Melvyn Hayes, whose presence can be distracting to some: he’s famous in Britain for playing a transvestite bombardier in a campy sitcom about a military “concert party” (troupe of entertainers) in WWII Burma, called It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Imagine OBJECTIVE, BURMA! only with more songs and dragging up. But Hayes is a very good actor and, unlikely as it seems, a resonably plausible physical embodiment of a juvenile Cushing. (Irrelevant sidenote: Cushing was dressed as a girl by his mother, a reaction perhaps to so many boys being lost in WWI.)

Second lead: Robert Urquhart, as the Sensible Friend. “I bet nobody talks about him because they’re all too busy looking at Cushing,” says Fiona. “But he’s GOOD.” It’s true. Playing straight man to Frankenstein can be a thankless role, but Urquhart (good, unpronounceable Scottish name) espouses the morality without becoming priggish or boring. Whenever he’s given the chance to loosen up a little, he takes it, breathing life into the character as surely as he restores respiration to a dead puppy. Plus he gets that great end scene, betraying his old friend in the hour of his greatest need — Hammer’s moral characters often tend to be even nastier than the villains, and Urquhart’s cold-bloodedness here prepares the way for horrible heroes like Van Helsing (what an appalling man!).

(Side-note — the best perf in Kenneth Branagh’s Francis Ford Coppola’s MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN is Tom Hulce, in the tedious role of Sensible Friend. He should be a bore, but he winds up the only character you’d care to have a pint with. Hulce, the miracle-worker.)

Talk about thankless parts: Hazel Court has little to do save remain in ignorance throughout. Seeing her in something like MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH or THE RAVEN shows what a capable, sexy and witty performer she could be: Roger Corman always gave her enjoyable parts. She’s in lots of Hammer films but rarely got any interesting business: she doesn’t even get vampirized. Not once.

Then there’s Christopher Lee, of course. I think it’s fair to say, with no unkindness intended, that the man was cast for his height, here. The part nearly went to Bernard Bresslaw, another tall man, who had to content himself with fleshing out the role of Rubba-Teetee the mummy in CARRY ON SCREAMING instead. Lee’s one-off perf as the creature — he couldn’t return in sequels because Sangster had, perhaps shortsightedly had him dumped in an acid bath at the end of this film (having already been shot and set alight) — did, however, lead him to the role of Dracula, which he made his own and got a whole series out of. Indeed, a whole career (262 screen roles listed on the IMDb, and still going strong).

Lee’s creature is devoid of any of the nobler qualities of the Karloff monster, but the performance is not without detail. “Looking like a road accident” in Phil Leakey’s gruesome slap (crude but effective would be a polite way to describe it), Lee plays the character as brain-damaged and confused. The encounter with the blind man is particularly interesting for Lee’s odd movements and posing. This creature isn’t evil, as such, just bewildered, and he lashes out in violence at everything he doesn’t understand — which is EVERYTHING. It took some effort, but I was able to find him sympathetic at some level, although the character/behaviour is a bit too close to that of some school bullies I recall. At least the Lee-creature has an excuse: the jar with his brain in was smashed against a wall. His brain’s probably full of broken beaker (his revival is prefigured by a sound of smashing glassware: Fiona wonders if this is the sound the creature makes when he thinks). “Why didn’t Frankenstein just get a new brain?” asks Fiona, agitated. “Even a bog-standard brain would be better than a genius brain that’s full of broken glass!”

Lee gets the film’s coolest shot (quoted by Kubrick in LOLITA! I should write a whole piece about Kubrick and Hammer films’ odd synergistic relationship) is Lee’s unmasking. Lurching about in muslin wrapping, he’s discovered by Cushing just as he raises his hand to the bandages swathing his lumpy kisser. The hand clutches the cloth, and just as it pulls away the covering, Fisher’s camera switches from 24fps to something more like 6, and we track in impossibly fast, Lee swooping forward at us in all his milky-eyed awfulness, his small movements suddenly insectoid in their inhuman speed.

“Hold your horses, I’m thinking with GLASS, here!”

It’s fascinating to me how Sangster and Fisher get away with delaying the monster’s appearance until about halfway through, with only a bit of medical grue and gallows-robbing to sustain the tension until the big reveal. Of course there’s something else at work: anticipation. Mary Shelley gets her monster onstage faster, but she was telling the story for the first time. Hammer realised they could rely on the audience already knowing the basic premise: they await the monster with eager dread. The tactic was to deliver a monster more unpleasant than expected.

The whole thing goes like a train, with the monster escaping, running amok, getting shot in the head, brought back to life, killing the French maid (as arranged by the Baron, since she’s outlived her usefulness and grown inconvenient) and finally escaping AGAIN and attacking Hazel Court. Time for the first of Hammer’s patented overkills (never JUST shove a stake through Dracula — try throwing holy water in his face, causing him to fall from a belfry into a pit with a stake in it, then poke him with a shovel just for good measure: DRACULA A.D. 1972), as Cushing shows more of his physical dexterity:

“I’ve created a monst — I mean, creature!”

Not only a great actor, also a great SHOT — right into the lens! The slung lantern sets Lee alight, and he falls into the convenient acid bath. Every home should have one. Except — not so convenient. Now there’s no evidence the monst creature ever existed, so Cushing’s going to be executed for the creature’s crimes. Which is fair enough, really.

A missed opportunity! As Cushing is led off to be executed (it suddenly occurs to us to wonder how he was convicted of the French maid’s murder, since presumably he dissolved her remains), we cut to the guillotine, its blade cranked up to the highest position. The credits roll…

And then — nothing! Fade to black. When it’s obvious to any gorehound that the blade should descend with a sickening SHOONK after the last credit has crawled off the top of the screen. THAT would be showbiz. Perhaps Hammer were already thinking about sequels, already regretting melting their creature like an Alka Seltzer. Using Cushing’s Baron as the constant feature of the films that followed, rather than his first creation, makes the Hammer FRANKENSTEINS delightfully different from their Universal forebears.

I’m indebted to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for the title of this post. I think it comes from an old copy of The Demon, and it stuck in my mind because I thought it was amusing. (Apparently I’m wrong about the provenance — see comments section.) Any title that seeks grandeur by shuffling the words around (THE RIVER WILD) makes me think of that Dorothy Parker line about “The Play Terrible.”

Let’s be clear — DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS is a B-picture. The opening credit, “Spartan Productions” is hilariously apt.

But D.G.F.M. doesn’t actually fit the “so-bad-it’s-good” paradigm, which is fortunate, because that’s become rather a boring formulation. In fact, bits of the film are genuinely excellent: there’s a really beautiful flying saucer, complete with spinning bit; a smashing robot; a sexy space girl in slinky dominatrix uniform; two more human women of interest to genre fans; and John Laurie, primarily known in Britain for his role in the sitcom Dad’s Army, but familiar to American cineastes for his appearnaces in THE EDGE OF THE WORLD and THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP.

Indeed, considering it’s a sci-fi thriller, there’s more than a whiff of situation comedy about DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS. More on this aspect later.

The bad bits of the film — the lethargic, stay-at-home plot, the indecisive villainess who should be driving the story but keeps dithering, leading man Hugh McDermott’s hideous face — are pretty bad, and sometimes annoying. The combination of good and bad elements is sort of enjoyable and exciting. You never know whether you’re going to be tickled or stabbed, entertainmentwise. It’s like a night out in Glasgow.

The “action” unfolds at a guest house in the Scottish highlands, host to more drama than is typically the case with such establishments, in my experience. A glamorous London fashion model fleeing a doomed relationship is already in residence — this is Hazel Court in her second fantasy film (she’d already done THE GHOST SHIP for Vernon Sewell two years earlier). Then a convicted wife-murderer, escaped from prison, arrives and is sheltered by barmaid Adrienne Corri (another horror/sci-fi regular, best known for being denuded by droogs in CLOCKWORK ORANGE, an Edinburgh-born Scots-Italian beauty who also worked for Preminger, Lean, Renoir…). Challenged to explain why this traveller has no money, she improvises a tale about him bending over to try and catch a salmon, then straightening up to find his wallet gone. The old “fish thief” story — very convincing.

Already we have the tea-obsessed housekeeper and her drunkard husband (John Laurie, natch) and a young nephew from London. Soon, a car-sharing Irish astrophycisist and American journalist turn up. It’s quite a houseful even before the alien invasion begins.

Prof. Hennessey tries to warm his hands on a spaceship.

The American is actually another Edinburgh-born actor, Hugh McDermott, but his accent seems to have taken a transatlantic turn. I have the same trouble myself, actually. Too many Marvel comics as a kid.

Then the saucer lands. And this is the off-season!

Our space vixen informs the residents that she’s come to pilfer our men, replacing the ones who were nuked in the Big Martian Sex War. She does this while ceaselessly, pointlessly walking up and down, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, which is mildly freaky and kind of effective. Then she tells them they’re surrounded by an invisible barrier and can’t escape — the scientist tries and comes back with a gashed forehead, having walked into it. “I believe what my brain tells me to believe,” he cries, on more than one occasion. He should stop listening, his brain is a fool.

The humes act up, so Mars-Gal shows them her robot, and it’s a beauty. It wantonly discomouferates things, like Gort from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, three years earlier. One of those coincidences, I expect. Fiona and I were delighted by the robots design, pure Japanese tin toy. And his impressive HEFT. “That terrible robot!” cries Corri. “He’s not, he’s smashing!” shouted Fiona back at her.

The Martian, Nyah, is Patricia Laffan, who played Poppaea in QUO VADIS?, so this may have seemed a bit of a come-down, but she throws herself into it with more sneering superiority than anybody’s ever seen. This is the role she’ll be remembered for. Did she have an inkling of this as she slunk around the tiny set in her erotic space-wear? She’s first seen evaporating a balding wee man, a stereotypical “little worm”, in fact, the image of the masochistic bank manager of suburban sexual legend. She’s also reminiscent of another space-domme, the legendary Supreme Commander Servalan from the B.B.C.’s fondly-remembered but slightly crap Blake’s Seven. Interestingly, Servalan was played by another ex-Hammer glamour queen, the unconventionally beautiful Jacqueline Pearce (PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, THE REPTILE). Pearce is still unconventionally beautiful and still acts, while also working in a monkey sanctuary.

Anyway, returning to the monkey sanctuary that is DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS: I felt that Nyah’s power is considerably diminished by her inability to make up her mind. It may be a Martian’s prerogative, but it doesn’t help the dramatic arc…

Prof. Hennessey tries to warm his hands on a spaceship. Again.

Basically, the dramatic part of the story all unfolds while the saucer is being repaired by “Charlie” the robot. (Not a very Martian name, I’d have thought, although maybe it’s actually spelled “Chaghrrl-A” or something.) During the course of this little pit-stop, Nyah first freezes Corri, then un-freezes her, hypnotises the murderer and makes him go all murderous (doesn’t seem like much of an achievement, but still), abducts the small boy, then releases him, takes the scientist aboard her ship for a little tour, allowing him to gather intelligence to use against them, then announces that she will take one of the men as a guide to help her find her way around London. This conjures amusing images of her quietly landing in Camden Town and wandering the streets in her space garb, unnoticed by the general populace.

The film then allows the characters time to furiously debate who should make the supreme sacrifice by going with Nyah and attempting to sabotage her saucer in mid-flight. But this is a pointless scene, since Nyah has just told them SHE will be making the choice. It’s downright weird, this.

Predictably, Bobby Murderer gets selected so he can redeem himself and the Earth is saved and the landlady gets the kettle on. Suddenly I got the feeling I’d been watching A Very Special Episode of Father Ted. The scientist looks a bit like an older Ted. There’s the dissolute drunkard. And the tea-obsessed housekeeper. Admittedly, there are more babes and spacecraft than usual…

“Now I think we all REALLY need a cup of tea!”

The film is also a fine entry in the gather-in-the-pub-as-the-world-ends school of science fiction, a substrain unique to Britain. See also SHAUN OF THE DEAD, THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING, and several of the QUATERMASS films. See them before you see this, actually. But see this anyway.

Shadowplay would like to thank Huckleberry Hound for the word “discomouferate”.